Elizabeth of York, consort of the founder of the Tudor dynasty, King Henry VII, is the least well known of the Tudor Queens. Both Henry and Elizabeth have been reduced to one dimensional stereotypes in the popular imagination: Henry the miser and Elizabeth the dutiful wife and mother whose image is the model for the queen on playing cards. In contrast, their son Henry VIII has been the subject of both scholarly analysis and popular biographies, which scrutinize all the known evidence concerning his personality, religious reforms, cultural patronage and his famous marriages.

Henry VIII’s six wives, Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr are the subjects of individual and collective studies that discuss them as private women and as queens. Many of Elizabeth of York’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, such as Queen Mary I, Elizabeth I, Lady Jane Grey and Mary, Queen of Scots are iconic figures in their own right. In Elizabeth of York: The Forgotten Tudor Queen, Amy Licence, author of Anne Neville: Richard III’s Tragic Queen and In Bed with the Tudors brings the first Tudor queen out of obscurity, looking at Henry VII’s consort within the context of her times and discussing her role in establishing the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty.

Throughout Elizabeth of York, Licence emphasizes the importance of viewing the Plantagenet princess and Tudor queen through the worldview of the late 15th century. Recent historical fiction featuring Elizabeth has speculated that the young princess was attracted to the power and personality of her uncle, Richard III, on the basis of an incomplete and no longer extant letter than might refer to any number of marriage plans for the King’s niece. Earlier speculation concerning Elizabeth imagined a romance with the future Henry VII, although it is unlikely that they met before he became King and their marriage was a foregone conclusion.

Licence reminds her readers that romance would have had little influence on Elizabeth’s choices or the choices that were made for her. As the eldest daughter of King Edward IV, her duty was to make a royal marriage that advanced the interests of her family. Once her Uncle, Richard III, seized the English throne in 1483, all Edward IV’s children were declared illegitimate and her brothers, the famous “Princes in the Tower” disappeared, it became all the more important that Elizabeth devote herself to restoring the fortunes of her mother and sisters. Drawing on scholarly studies such as Elizabeth of Yorkby Arlene Naylor Okerlund, Licence speculates that the princess may have served as a kind of spy for her mother, Elizabeth Woodville and future mother-in-law, Margaret Beaufort at the court of Richard III.

Licence’s discussion of the culture of late 15th century suggests some revealing conclusions about the major figures in Elizabeth’s life. The marriage between her parents, Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, took place in secret on the May Day, when the boundaries within the social hierarchy were temporarily set aside. The timing, secrecy and Edward IV’s rumoured history of going through some form of marriage with women who resisted his advances suggests that he may have planned initially to repudiate the union. Licence also looks at Richard III’s reputation during his reign, before the Tudors came to power, highlighting evidence that he was already rumoured to have murdered his nephews before he was killed at the Battle of Bosworth field in 1485.

The final chapter of Elizabeth of York is the strongest because the best documented year of the Queen’s life was the last one before she died of childbirth in 1503  at the age of 37. Elizabeth’s accounts in the last year of her life reveal an active queen consort whose reputation for charity and intercession tempered Henry VII’s perceived severity and frugality. Records of her religious donations and pilgrimages reveal a strong identification with the Virgin Mary as an intercessor and bereaved mother. Elizabeth’s devotions increased after the death of her eldest son Arthur and she and Henry VII appear to have been particularly united in the aftermath of this family tragedy.

As Queen, Elizabeth of York is less well documented than future generations of Tudor women but Amy Licence reveals hints of the personality behind the illustration on playing cards to a broad popular audience in Elizabeth of York: The Forgotten Tudor Queen. Elizabeth’s Yorkist ancestry, popularity with the English people and intercessory activities were crucial to establishing the Tudors as a legitimate dynasty during the reign of Henry VII>

The Wars of the Roses or “The Cousins Wars” as they were known in the fifteenth century are a difficult period for any historian. The Latin monastic chronicles that described the main events of the Middle Ages were going out of style at this time and England did not yet have a strong tradition of secular historical writing. The surviving primary sources often contradict one another, resulting in wildly different interpretations of the same historical figures.

The current controversy about whether King Richard III was an honorable Prince who assumed the throne in 1483 for the good of England or a power hungry usurper who ordered the murder of his nephews may never be resolved because of the absence of key sources. The lives of the mothers, wives and daughters of the Princes who fought in the Wars of the Roses are even more difficult to reconstruct. In Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses, Sarah Gristwood, a journalist and author of Elizabeth & Leicester and Arbella: England’s Lost Queen pieces together both the political role of the women of the Wars of the Roses and the social history of women at court in fifteenth century England.

Gristwood looks at seven pivotal figures from Henry VI’s coming of age in 1437 to the ascension of Henry VIII in 1509. Henry VI’s wife Marguerite of Anjou came from a family of powerful Queens and noblewomen. Marguerite’s grandmother Yolande of Aragon, was a patron of Joan of Arc who influenced King Charles VII of France’s rise to power during the Hundred Years War. When Henry VI developed what would now be diagnosed as catatonic schizophrenia, Marguerite assumed a leadership role at his court but discovered that the English were hostile to foreign queens assuming power.

Cecily Neville was the matriarch of the House of York, wife of Richard, Duke of York and mother of King Edward IV and King Richard III. Despite her influence over her husband and sons and connections to other powerful figures of the period, she has never been the subject of a full biography. Cecily’s youngest daughter, Margaret of York, supported the her family’s ambitions from Burgundy. Her support for Yorkist claimants to the English throne threatened the legitimacy of Margaret Beaufort’s son, Henry VII. Margaret Beaufort was a senior member of the House of Lancaster in England. Following the birth of her son, Henry Tudor, at the age of thirteen, she was unable to have more children and became fiercely ambitious for her only child.

Elizabeth Woodville was an unlikely Queen of England, a Lancastrian widow with two sons who caught the eye of Edward IV. Gristwood reminds her readers that Elizabeth Woodville was not simply a commoner who had married above her station but a descendant of the ruling House of Luxembourg through her mother. The favour shown to her numerous relatives at court alienated Edward IV’s supporters including Anne Neville’s father, the Earl of Warwick. Despite first marrying Marguerite of Anjou’s only son Edward then becoming the consort of Richard III, Anne is the most under-documented figure in Gristwood’s book. Gristwood speculates that she was politically marginalized by Richard III, who assumed control over her extensive lands in the North of England.

Following the Battle of Bosworth field in 1485, the Houses of Lancaster and York were united through the wedding of Henry VII to Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York. The first Tudor queen is often assumed to have been a passive figure but Gristwood analyzes evidence that Elizabeth had been raised to become a queen and attempted to shape her own destiny at the court of Richard III. Elizabeth of York appears to have exerted a profound a influence on her daughters, Queen Margaret of Scotland and Queen Mary of France and her younger son, King Henry VIII.

Through her comparative study of the seven most prominent women of the Wars of the Roses, Gristwood reveals the abrupt changes in the fortune that were typical for royal and aristocratic families of the period. Cecily Neville narrowly missed her opportunity to become queen when her husband Richard of York was killed in battle. Elizabeth Woodville’s eldest son was born in sanctuary but she regained her throne when Edward IV triumphed over Marguerite of Anjou. Margaret Beaufort was accused of treason during the reign of Richard III then became a respected councillor to her son, Henry VII.

Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses is a fascinating joint biography of seven of the most prominent women in fifteenth century England. Gristwood makes excellent use of the limited source material about the women behind the conflict that defined the last decades of Plantagenet rule in England. The leadership roles assumed by the wives, mother and daughters of England’s last Plantagenet Kings set precedents for the famous reigning queens of the Tudor dynasty, Mary I and Elizabeth I.

Mary Boleyn: Mistress of Kings is a biography that constantly reminds its readers how little is known about its subject. The mistress of King Francois I of France and King Henry VIII of England and the sister of Anne Boleyn, one of England’s most controversial queens, did not keep a diary and was the author of only two surviving letters. In contrast to the popular view of King Henry VIII’s court perpetuated by fictional portrayals such as the television series, The Tudors, the Tudor King conducted affairs outside his six marriages discreetly. Henry VIII left little evidence of his relationships with his mistresses and only publicly acknowledged a single child out of wedlock, Elizabeth Blount’s son, Henry Fitzroy.

Mary’s relationship with King only became a matter of public record because it rendered his subsequent marriage to her sister Anne “incestuous” in the eyes of the Roman Catholic church. King Henry VIII annulled his first marriage to his brother Arthur’s widow, Catherine of Aragon to marry the sister of his former mistress, Mary Boleyn. The King’s “Great Matter” brought Mary’s royal affairs into the open and shaped her reputation as” a great and infamous whore” (The subtitle of the British edition of the book).

Popular historian Alison Weir’s approach to the life of Mary Boleyn is similar to her treatment of John of Gaunt’s third wife Katherine Swynford in her previous book, Mistress of the Monarchy: The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster. Weir places the known facts about Mary within the context of her times and provides informed speculation about the gaps in the source material. Like Katherine Swynford, the image of Mary Boleyn in the current popular imagination has been shaped by a single bestselling novel. For general readers, Mary is the heroine of Philippa’s Gregory’s novel, The Other Boleyn Girl just as the Duchess of Lancaster is synonymous with Anya Seton’s Katherine.

Weir refutes the portrayal of Mary in Gregory’s novel, concluding that she was probably the eldest Boleyn daughter rather than the youngest and was most likely in her twenties rather than her teens when her affair with Henry VIII took place. Weir also devotes considerable attention to the paternity to Mary’s children, born during her first marriage to William Carey. While Gregory’s novel presents both Katherine and Henry as children of Henry VIII, and previous historians have doubted either child was fathered by the King, Weir presents strong circumstantial evidence that Katherine was the King’s daughter. Katherine received land grants at the time of her marriage and there is evidence that Henry VIII had other daughters outside his marriages whom he did not publicly acknowledge.

The most significant analysis in Mary Boleyn: Mistress of Kings is the challenge to centuries of portrayals of Mary as a promiscuous woman who reveled in her love affairs and embarrassed her ambitious family. Just as Retha Warnicke argued that Henry VIII’s fifth wife Katherine Howard was targeted by predatory men in Wicked Women of Tudor England: Queens, Aristocrats, Commoners, Weir observes the power imbalance between Mary her royal lovers, who were among the most powerful European rulers of her era. There is not any evidence from Mary’s lifetime that she flaunted her relationships with the Kings of France and England and it is possible that she was reluctant to became involved with either monarch. One of her two surviving letters is a passionate justification of her second marriage to a man from a comparatively modest background, which removed her from the court where she had been Henry VIII’s mistress.

Mary Boleyn: Mistress of Kings brings together the scattered and often contradictory source material about King Henry VIII’s shadowy mistress. Weir’s informed speculation challenges the popular mythology surrounding Mary including  the plot of The Other Boleyn Girl and the longstanding perception that she chose to be a “promiscuous” woman. There is not enough surviving evidence about Mary’s life to provide a full picture of her character and motives but Weir’s analysis places the elusive royal mistress within the vivid settings of the courts of France and England in the sixteenth century.

After Elizabeth I died in 1603, her reign acquired a legendary quality. Both her immediate Stuart successors, James I and Charles I favoured monarchical government by divine right, which conflicted with the assertive parliamentary government that Elizabeth managed throughout her reign. The Stuarts also inflamed religious tensions in the British Isles as they attempted to impose Church of England forms of worship on Presbyterian Scotland while appearing to tolerate Roman Catholicism at Court. By the time these political and religious tensions precipitated the English Civil Wars in the 1640s, the reign of Elizabeth I appeared to be a Golden Age of prosperity and harmony.

The twenty five year old Elizabeth I in her coronation robes, embroidered with Tudor roses

Since Elizabeth I was preceded by her sister Mary I, who was famous for ordering the burning of Protestants who refused to conform to her Catholic religious settlement and succeeded by the misrule of the Stuarts, the religious conflict of her own reign largely disappeared from the popular imagination. In Heretic Queen: Queen Elizabeth I and the Wars of Religion, biographer and screenwriter Susan Ronald invites readers to step away from the Tudor mythology that has inspired popular histories, novels and films and immerse themselves in Elizabeth’s England, where religion infused every aspect of daily life and public disagreement with the Queen’s conception of the Church of England could cost Roman Catholics or dissenting Puritans their lives. Ronald dramatically retells Elizabeth I’s reign through the lens of her role in the sixteenth century Wars of Religion, revealing the violence and conflict that accompanied the seemingly peaceful Elizabethan religious settlement.

In contrast with her contemporaries in continental Europe, such as Catherine de Medici, Regent of France and King Philip II of Spain, and her siblings, Edward VI and Mary I, Elizabeth had an unusually tolerant attitude to the religious conflict that followed the Protestant Reformation. “There is only one Christ, Jesus, one faith,” the Queen once proclaimed, “All else is a dispute over trifles.” In this spirit, Elizabeth attempted to introduce a state religion that would satisfy the greatest number of her subjects, with a Protestant Book of Common Prayer and the familiar rituals of the old medieval Catholic Church.

Portrait of Elizabeth I celebrating her victory over the Spanish Armada

While Ronald argues Elizabeth I’s approach to religion ultimately helped make England a great world power, the Elizabethan settlement was reviled by both Roman Catholics and Protestant Puritans who favoured their own religious traditions. Since Elizabeth ruled as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, public adherence to the state church was synonomous with obedience to the monarch.

To defend her church and her authority, Elizabeth executed or drove into exile Roman Catholic nobility in the North of England, who had enjoyed near autonomous authority over the turbulent borderlands between England and Scotland. The Queen also accepted Protestant exiles from continental Europe who were fleeing French or Spanish Catholic religious authority. These displacements of whole families or communities changed England, filling the cities of the south with Huguenot artisans and finally subordinating the North to the monarch’s full authority.

Elizabeth’s role in the sixteenth century Wars of Religion is well told by Ronald, but her interpretation of some of the Queen of England’s fellow rulers does not incorporate the full range of recent scholarship concerning their own political and religious activities. Ronald is correct to place Mary, Queen of Scots in her proper French context. As the widow of King Francois II, her political interests were intertwined with those the French monarchy. The question of whether Mary acquiesced to the murder of her second husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, however, is not discussed at length. Ronald states that Mary argued the incriminating “Casket Letters” were a forgery then concludes, “Of course she would, wouldn’t she?”

The scholarly and popular debate regarding the authenticity of the Casket letters should have been discussed in greater depth as these documents strongly influenced Elizabeth’s treatment of her cousin and fellow sovereign. Ronald also uncritically accepts the traditional view that Catherine de Medici ordered the massacre of thousands of Huguenots on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. Catherine’s recent biographers have separated the removal of Huguenot leaders from the wider massacre, suggesting that popular religious violence far exceeded the expectations or political goals of the Dowager Queen and her sons. Just as Elizabeth I’s reign achieved a popular mythology as a golden age, Mary, Queen of Scots and Catherine de Medici also inspired received wisdom that has recently been debated by historians.

Heretic Queen: Queen Elizabeth I and the Wars of Religion vividly retells Elizabeth I’s role in the sixteenth century European Wars of Religion, demonstrating that a violent struggle accompanied the Queen’s religious compromise. While Elizabeth would be glorified after her death, she had to fight for her legitimacy as Queen and her religious settlement in her own lifetime. Ending the Protestant Reformation in England involved as much turmoil and displacement as the beginning of the religious upheaval introduced by Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII.

When Queen Elizabeth II ascended to the thrones of the United Kingdom and fifteen other commonwealth nations in 1952, the press hailed her reign as a new Elizabethan age. In contrast, the new Queen herself believed she had little in common with her sixteenth century predecessor, Elizabeth I. In the first Christmas broadcast of her reign, delivered from New Zealand, Elizabeth II stated, “I do not myself feel at all like my great Tudor forebear, who was blessed with neither husband nor children, who ruled as a despot and was never able to leave her native shores.”

Elizabeth II correctly noted the differences in family life, monarchical government and ability to travel between herself and her predecessors but there is one crucial similarity between the two queens. The reigns of both Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II are notable for the monarch’s engagement with the wider world. Elizabeth II has become the world’s most traveled monarch, visiting remote commonwealth nations unfamiliar to her predecessors while Elizabeth I engaged in more personal correspondence with foreign monarchs that any previous English monarch.

Rayne Allinson’s fascinating book, A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and English Diplomacy in the Reign of Elizabeth Ilooks at the Queen’s foreign policy through her letters, analyzing her complex relationships with her fellow rulers, Philip II of Spain, Mary, Queen of Scots, Catherine de Medici, Ivan the Terrible of Russia, Sultan Murad III of the Ottoman Empire, Henry IV of France and her eventual successor, James VI of Scotland. The world had become a smaller place in the sixteenth century with the Italian practice of posting regular foreign ambassadors spreading throughout much of Europe and the continent’s monarchs expanding their networks of trade and exploration. As a talented linguist and prolific letter writer since childhood, Elizabeth I responded to these new conditions by establishing personal relationships with her fellow monarchs through correspondence.

Allinson devotes each chapter to a different one of Elizabeth I’s illustrious correspondents, demonstrating that the queen used different rhetorical techniques and a wide variety of decorative flourishes depending on her relationship with the recipient. While Allinson’s research demonstrates that Elizabeth I and Philip II viewed each others’ ambassadors as bearers of bad news throughout their reigns, the personal correspondence between the two monarchs maintained the pretense of friendship until the outbreak of war between the two kingdoms. As a more experienced ruler and the widower of Elizabeth’s sister and predecessor, Mary I, Philip adopted a mentoring tone in his letters and attempted to advise the new queen.

Elizabeth largely ignored the King of Spain’s advice but adopted a similar tone with her younger cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. The Queen of England maintained the voice of calm authority through her letters as Mary’s correspondence became increasingly emotional as her authority over her kingdom collapsed. As godmother to Mary’s son, James, Elizabeth would adopt a parental tone in her letters with the young King of Scotland, which eased the transition between the Tudor and Stuart dynasties in England.

The form of a royal letter was as significant as its tone. Elizabeth I’s royal correspondents in Western Europe expected their letters to be signed with a small privy seal, which demonstrated their close relationship with their fellow monarch. In contrast, Tsar Ivan and the family of Sultan Murad sent ornate letters to Elizabeth I and expected her responses to be just as magnificent looking, displaying the Queen’s great seal. If the ruler of Russia or the Ottoman Empire believed himself slighted by Elizabeth I because of the display or delivery of her letters, the merchants of the Muscovy company or Turkey company would lose valuable trading channels. Elizabeth I’s personal engagement with the rulers of Russia and the Ottoman Empire was unprecedented for an English monarch and she encountered cultural differences and misunderstandings over the course of these new diplomatic and economic relationships.

In addition to her well researched scholarly analysis of Elizabeth I’s correspondence, Allinson also has a eye for revealing details that bring Elizabeth I and her correspondents to life. Philip II’s first letter to Elizabeth as a reigning queen was also her first proposal of marriage, filled with passionate rhetorical flourishes unmatched in the King’s other letters. Ivan the Terrible’s desire for a secret correspondence with Elizabeth inspired him to send her a packet of letters pickled in a wooden bottle of vodka. By the time they reached the English court by horseback and ship from Moscow, the smell of alcohol on the pages was overwelming.

Perhaps the most significant detail about Elizabeth I is her scrutiny of one of Ivan’s original letters. The Queen saw similarities between the Cyrillic script of the Russian language and the classical Greek she knew from her childhood tutors and declared she “could quicklie lern it.” Elizabeth I’s fascination with the world beyond her kingdom informed her monarchy of letters, inspiring her correspondence with more foreign monarchs than any previous English sovereign. A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and English Diplomacy in the Reign of Elizabeth I analyzes the full extent of Elizabeth I’s foreign policy through the fascinating letters exchanged with her fellow rulers.

The Tudor dynasty had ruled England for less than seventy years when Henry VIII’s eldest daughter seized power to rule as Mary I. Throughout the reigns of Edward VI, Henry VII and Henry VIII, the rituals and ceremonies of kingship affirmed the legitimacy of the young dynasty and its rulers. The coronation of a king, the negotiation and ceremony of his marriage, and the interplay between the ruler as dispenser of justice and his wife as an the intercessor on behalf of his weakest subjects all demonstrated the strength and authority of English monarchical government in the sixteenth century.

As a Tudor ruler, Mary I needed these ceremonies to affirm her authority but as England’s first undisputed female monarch, she had to modify rituals to address her subjects’ concerns about a woman’s right to sovereignty. In Mary I: Gender, Power, and Ceremony in the Reign of England’s First Queen, Sarah Duncan analyzes at the most important ceremonies of Mary I’s reign including her coronation, wedding, public judgements and religious observances to determine how Mary I affirmed her right to rule England as a female monarch.

The controversial five year reign of Queen Mary I has long been a favourite subject for Tudor historians and biographers. The traditional interpretation is that it was an unmitigated disaster, marked by a highly unpopular, childless marriage to the future King Philip II of Spain, and the mass burning of Protestants in a failed attempt to return England to Roman Catholic observance that earned the queen the sobriquet “Bloody Mary.” In Mary Tudor and Tudor England, David Loades and John Guy respectively argue that Mary I was a conventional sixteenth century woman, incapable of political manipulation or using her gender to her advantage.

Mary has been treated more sympathetically by revisionist biographers such as Linda Porter in The First Queen of England: The Myth of “Bloody Mary” and Anna Whitelock in Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queenwho point to the significance of her accomplishment in becoming accepted as a female ruler in a monarchical government that assumed the sovereign would be male. Duncan adopts a different approach than both the positive and negative biographies of Mary I, focusing on ceremonies and rituals instead of political events. Nevertheless, she clearly believes that the Queen’s ability to project an image of kingship to her subjects has been underestimated. English history might have been very different if Mary’s pregnancy had been genuine instead of the early symptoms of dropsy.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Mary I: Gender, Power, and Ceremony in the Reign of England’s First Queen is Duncan’s reexamination of the marriage of Mary and Philip. Even Mary’s most sympathetic biographers refer to the queen’s emotional attachment to Philip’s father, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, her love of children and her admiration of Philip’s portrait as factors contributing to her unpopular marriage. Duncan’s analysis of the rituals surrounding the marriage negotiations, reveals that an unpopular foreign marriage gave Mary more political leverage to dictate the terms of her union than a popular domestic match with an accepted English noble.

Since Mary’s subjects feared Philip would wield power in England as Mary’s husband, the Queen insisted on a contract that preserved her rights as ruler, in the manner of her grandmother, Queen Isabella of Castille. Throughout their marriage, Philip and Mary often reversed the accepted gender roles within royal couples with the queen taking the initiative in their ceremonial courtship and Philip occasionally acting as an intercessor. Philip’s popularity appeared to increase when Mary seemed to be pregnant only to decline once more as Mary’s health deteriorated.

Mary I: Gender, Power, and Ceremony in the Reign of England’s First Queen is a fascinating look at the reign of Mary I through the ceremonies and rituals that legitimized her rule. Duncan’s extensive research and readable style will appeal to both scholars of gender and power in the sixteenth century and Tudor history enthusiasts interested in a fresh approach to the reign of one of England’s most controversial rulers.